Stakeholder participation for the purpose of helping ensure evaluation validity: Bridging the gap between collaborative and non-collaborative evaluations

Collaborative evaluations, in which program stakeholders participate extens ively, typically are conducted for the primary purpose of enhancing the use of evaluation findings, and non-collaborative evaluations, in which stakeh olders do not participate extensively, typically are conducted for the prim ary purpose of generating valid findings. This article shows how the gap ca n be bridged between these two types of evaluations. The article synthesize s, and elaborates on, a small body of recent research that showed that cons iderable interaction with stakeholders during the evaluation of small educa tion programs helped achieve the raison d'etre of non-collaborative evaluat ions-that is, to enhance validity. It is also shown that theories and metho ds of stakeholder participation for the purpose of enhancing validity, whic h by and large have been ignored in the collaborative evaluation literature , can improve the quality of collaborative studies.